Dot Pulse #23 — “Death” of Statemine & Bit.Country Deep Dive
Learn about the RMRK migration, the Bit.Country metaverse, parachain auctions on Polkadot and Kusama, plus governance watcher! 📣
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This week it’s the turn of Bit.Country, which shares mostly the same name between Kusama and Polkadot. On Kusama, Bit.Country Pioneer took the 13th project slot with over 200,000 KSM, which was quite high for this stage of the parachain auctions. It’s not quite a DeFi parachain, but you’ll surely see it pop up in a few liquidity pools here and there, so it’s definitely worth exploring!
Bit.Country, the Metaverse Parachain
Bit.Country is a Metaverse repository and framework built on Substrate. You can start thinking about it as Decentraland on Polkadot, but Bit.Country definitely goes beyond that initial concept!
In fact, Bit.Country is more like a Metaverse of Metaverses, expanding the concept from one single game world into the Continuum, a world made of expandable sub-blocks that are each their own Metaverse with their own land plots.
You could definitely see how this would be useful! For example Minecraft has tons of different servers with different player settlements and flavors. If we were to scale the Metaverse to these heights of adoption, you’d definitely need more than one single world!
Of course buying a plot in the Metaverse is all about its utility and scarcity. With worlds of worlds, there’d be tons of different land plots to buy. That’s not so bad though: think about how land in Hong Kong is (infinitely) more expensive than in Shenzhen, or any other place in the world. People pay the HK premium for a reason, and a similar thing should happen in Bit.Country!
This difference reflects the more community-centric nature of Bit.Country. Unlike monolithic Metaverse games, Bit.Country is designed to be an accessible place for communities to set up their own metaverses. This could be influencers, projects and corporations who want to create their own virtual world for their communities.
What can you do in the Metaverse anyway?
Each Bit.Country Metaverse is quite flexible and modular! The basic environment is a 3D world where you can explore the territory as an avatar.
A WIP demo of the game.
Each Bit.Country Metaverse has a few subdivisions, which is a buildable area owned by a resident of the Bit.Country. The owner has full control of their subdivision, which allows them to place things like virtual dApps, NFT art, or 3D assets made with the voxel (3D pixel) engine.
The terrain of a subdivision is also fully customizable, and Bit.Country does support interiors in buildings too.
If you’re a player though, it’s not just about building! You can take part in missions created by subdivision holders and the community, participate in your local neighborhood governance, and go to the marketplace to trade NFTs in-game. Indeed, the metaverse can become an interface into other dApps. Think using Uniswap from inside the game, it’s that sort of coolness!
Metaverse creators also have a variety of map templates and themes to choose from, which can be both in-built and community-made.
So overall Bit.Country metaverses are pretty much what you’d expect from that definition! The directions this could take are basically infinite, and they only depend on what the community wants to build.
The Metaverse Parachain
Let’s now talk a bit more about why Bit.Country chose to become a parachain on both Kusama and Polkadot. The blockchain side of Bit.Country is called Metaverse.Network, and it’s a Substrate-based blockchain like any other parachain candidate. The Kusama deployment is called Bit.Country Pioneer, for pretty obvious reasons!
The Metaverse.Network powers all of the economic functions of the network, including paying with transaction fees with NUUM on Polkadot or NEER tokens on Kusama, but also minting and importing NFTs, managing land plots on the metaverses, adding fungible tokens etc.
The parachain is optimized for the tasks it needs to compute to make the game run, but it also supports the EVM pallet and thus Solidity smart contracts.
Bit.Country is probably one of the best examples of why parachains are valuable as a kind of specialized block space. The value of a transaction interacting with DeFi protocols is likely to be many, many times higher than that of buying a small game NFT on Bit.Country. So DeFi users will accept huge gas fees, driving out gamers.
Metaverse games running on generalized blockchains like Ethereum have to contend with this issue, which is why most are now choosing alternative solutions like Polygon. But even that one will eventually reach capacity! Specialized parachains don’t suffer from this: you don’t need to compete for gas with MEV DeFi bots if there is no DeFi on that blockchain!
Bit.Country is still in early access mode, so the game isn’t quite playable yet. But after taking the parachain slot and a massive community raise, the project seems to be on the right track!
NUUM, NEER and crowdloan stats
Bit.Country follows a dual token model like many other games. There is NUUM and NEER, which are the governance plus utility tokens for the two respective deployments. They do have functions as a universal currency to buy Bit.Country land, virtual dApps and other stuff, but the main in-game currency is BIT.
Owning Land gives players a certain allocation of BIT, which is expended when creating objects or buying in-game upgrades.
As for the NEER crowdloan, the project was offering 15% of supply which went to over 25,000 contributors who put up 209k KSM.
Sadly the token isn’t tradable yet, so we can’t estimate returns. The team has yet to go through some key steps like Sudo key removal and finalizing the NEER distribution, so stay tuned!
Centrifuge has won the third slot of the Polkadot parachain auction, gathering over 5 million DOT! HydraDX is the next in line and currently looking as the most likely winner for the next slot, though things may still get a shake up!
On Kusama, Crab Network has won the current auction with 7,500 KSM raised. Litmus is now in the lead, followed by SORA and Pichiu
Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)
TL;DR: The platform offers 10% of supply to bring trustless Bitcoin to Polkadot. Plenty of referral bonuses, double dips and early bird encouragement.
TL;DR: The DeFi protocol offers 10% of its supply in the crowdloan, but it works on a first-come first-serve basis! The team doesn’t want to pay too much for the slot, stopping rewards once squarely in the lead.
TL;DR: This DeFi-focused parachain offers 20% of the supply in a variety of base and early bird and referral bonuses. Plus, it gives you an xDOT derivative to make use of your assets!
Active Farms
Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX
Yields are around 16% APR (or 23% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM.
KSM/LKSM farm has 10% APR (36% with loyalty)
KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 45%, 50% with loyalty.
A couple of new farms popped up:
KAR/LKSM with 19%/95% APR
kUSD/LKSM with 31%/157% APR
kUSD/RMRK with 130% APR
Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC
APR is 93% with loyalty, 28% without.
Moonriver Farms
Sushi farms on Moonriver offer decent double-digit APR for blue chips.
Solarbeam provides up to 160% APR on Pool2s, but Pool1s are weaker.
RomeDAO is giving a 10% return every 5 days for OHM-style staking.
Moonbeam farms
On Moonbeam we have Solarflare, the Moonbeam deployment of Solarbeam. The Pool2s are very strong with up to 690% APRs and good choice of Pool1s with >100% APR. If you’re into stables right now, there are a couple of stablecoin-only pools with max APR of 15%.
This week we saw a major development for RMRK, an NFT project that’s been on Polkadot since before it had any parachains or smart contracts!
RMRK is available on Statemine, the common good Kusama parachain designed for token transfers. Well, that’s going to change soon!
Now that other parachains are live and can support XCM, it means that RMRK can spread and “infect” these other chains. This is a great benefit for RMRK holders because Statemine doesn’t support any token programmability.
As RMRK explains, Statemine is now “dead” and its holders should migrate to the other parachains where it has XCM support.
Before you worry, “dead” doesn’t mean that Statemine is getting killed off! It’s just that RMRK outgrew Statemine, a chain that has always been intended for payments and cross-exchange transfers due to its limitations. It’s supposed to be the primary home of permissioned assets like Tether, which is very often used for those purposes. And that’s perfectly fine, as it means we’ll get very cheap transfers if we just need basic capabilities!
The RMRK migration is not yet complete as governance is only supported on Statemine. But that’s expected to change soon, after which there will be no reason to hold RMRK on Statemine except for potentially sending them to a centralized exchange.
After securing Kusama’s second common good parachain slot, Encointer began its deployment to the network. In the post, the Encointer’s team takes a deep dive into the context of creating Encointer and the problems it addresses, which we explained in a past edition.
Opening of the HRMP channel between Statemine and Bifrost now allows RMRK to migrate from Statemine to Bifrost, with the cross-chain DEX Zenlink providing support for that. Zenlink will also launch the RMRK Bootstrap and RMRK Liquidity Incentive Program (Farming) to provide additional gains for RMRK holders on Bifrost.
Octopus Network, a grant recipient in the Astar Builders Program, is building a versatile bridge on Astar, which will allow all Cosmos SDK-based blockchains to connect to the Polkadot ecosystem through Astar. The bridge will be deployed and tested on the Shiden network.
With Acala’s imminent launch on Polkadot, Acala shares factoids about the network, such as the team behind the project, the Hybrid Finance Vision, lcDOT and more.
Moonbeam celebrates reaching one million transactions on the network. Moonbeam is also bringing new integrations, 100k+ wallets, 700+ ERC-20 tokens and 1M GLMR tokens locked with collators to the Polkadot ecosystem.
(Polkadot) Motion 146 a bounty proposal, Polkadot Pioneers Prize, to propel technical innovation on the Polkadot network.
(Polkadot) Motion 143, to upgrade Polkadot’s runtime to v9151. .
(Kusama) Referendum 170, to unbrick the Picasso chain. The issue appears to be an unfinished function that made its way to production with a todo! macro, which kills the entire program (blockchain) if executed.
(Kusama) Motion 426 a proposal to cover the expenses of milestones 4-5 of SubVT.
All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!